


Favors

by 9_miho



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Hetalia Kink Meme, Morticians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-08 08:24:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1933827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_miho/pseuds/9_miho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hetalia Kink Meme - Modern AU about non-barista occupations - Morticians, America, Canada</p><p>“You’re a what?” was the general reaction Alfred got, even now, when he could see some crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes and a little more gray in his hair. Because he was still tall and blond and quick to smile and liked to wear a lot of white and blue and brown.</p><p>“A mortician,” Alfred would say with a smile, as if the person really was hard of hearing and needed a kind repetition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Favors

“You’re a what?” was the general reaction Alfred got, even now, when he could see some crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes and a little more gray in his hair. Because he was still tall and blond and quick to smile and liked to wear a lot of white and blue and brown.

“A mortician,” Alfred would say with a smile, as if the person really was hard of hearing and needed a kind repetition.

They’d look at him, as if mentally changing his worn jeans and leather jacket to a stiff black suit. Of course, they’d have a hard time reconciling his smile. Some of the more visual types then would consider the idea of him cutting open corpses and replacing fluids in a ghoulish morgue.

The conversation generally turned to other topics very quickly.

People would have expected Matthew to have taken over the family business; Alfred’s father wasn’t going to get any younger and besides, Alfred seemed better off as some brilliant software engineer or a baseball star or anything but dealing with the dead. But Matthew hadn’t taken biology or chemistry or business management in college; he’d opted for civil engineering. And Alfred had been the one to be in chemistry and physiology and pathology and he’d announced to stunned silence at Christmas dinner that he’d been accepted to a mortuary science program after graduation.

Despite it all, Matthew had had a relieved look in his eyes. Alfred had mouthed, “You owe me.”

But Alfred had flourished at school. He’d made friends and drunk a lot more than he should have. He’d had an engagement and it had been broken off, mutually. Then he’d started work at the family business and it had taken a while for anyone to take him seriously.

What he rarely told anyone was that he enjoyed embalming. He liked the careful art of putting someone back together for one last time, using wax and paint and tiny stitches. In the tiled room with the bright fluorescent lights, it was only him and the deceased. Later, there would be the time when he would have to wear his stiff black suit and slick back his hair and be reminded that funerals were for the living, not really the deceased.

Matthew never asked about the business. Maybe he had to complete his departure from his father’s shadow by pretending it didn’t exist. Alfred never brought it up either except in passing: “Sorry, can’t go. I have something this Saturday.” “Will b late. EmergenC.” And that was another mercy that he would give his cousin because he could.

Alfred was never one for over self-reflection but when his thirtieth birthday crawled around, when he was looking through stuff on his desk and found Matthew’s baby announcement, he wondered when the two of them had switched lives. Matthew had married young to a college sweetheart (some Ukrainian transfer student) and the two of them had started having babies ever after not long after the wedding. Alfred had thought about a wife, children, a golden retriever (guess which one of them he actually had?) but it was rather a vague whim instead of a set goal, more like idly thinking that Chinese would be good for tomorrow’s dinner. Certainly Matthew was living the life that the family thought Alfred would be having, red brick house with white picket fence and all. But it was Alfred who was living in a well-appointed but still small and somewhat modest townhouse, who never showed signs of bringing a girl (or a boy) home.

Matthew might have noticed it and in his own way felt a little bit of guilt but didn’t exactly have the means of inquiring about it. He got Alfred expensive gifts for holidays, offered to introduce him to pretty, vivacious, brilliant girls who wouldn’t run screaming. And Alfred would laugh and accept the gifts but decline the offers, more interested in the developments in Matthew’s company than any of the business partners or developers, no matter how pretty they were.

Still, the space between them filled up with those words and other words too and of course they would drift, as people often did.

Alfred got the call sometime around six AM. He had been awake to go on a run with Tony, not still dozing in bed which would have properly maximized the drama. But he did tear out of his apartment to the hospital, even though he’d heard those damned words that strangled nearly any kind of hope.

Brain dead.

Matthew Williams, beloved husband, father of four children with one more on the way, kind employer, competent engineer, was removed from artificial respiration two weeks after he was brought into the hospital from a car crash. He was just thirty-five years old.

Alfred hadn’t cried when they took his cousin off life support; Katrya was doing that enough for all of them, enough that they were also afraid she was going to miscarry. Instead, Alfred had to stand there as she sobbed into his shoulder because that was what he did in this kind of situation. He stood still and let someone else cry even when he wanted to do anything but be a rock.

People generally thought Alfred was a bad liar. He was; but he was pretty good at peppering his little tells and fumbles in regular conversation, enough that people just thought he was an idiot who didn’t know much better. What he had was the ability to say things with not so much a straight face but a smiling one without a single tremble to the voice (but a lot of “um” and “err”).

It took a lot to get the family to let him take care of Matthew's - _Mattie’s_ \- body.

It was bad form for an embalmer to take care of family; grief was known to make the work not like catharsis but additional trauma. But somehow, he got to do it and he’d insisted that he’d rather see the job done than give it to anyone else. They were going to keep tabs on him after this, he thought as he prepped the machinery and the tools one last time and then drew on a fresh pair of gloves before going to work.

He thought about that for the first few moments as he did one last rinse of Mattie’s body and hair and started the gruesome task of massaging the taut limbs and stiff face, putting on eye caps to keep Mattie’s eyes closed lest Katrya and the kids get the unpleasant shock of seeing beloved blue-violet eyes now turned to milky white. There would be people asking him to come over for Sunday dinner, asking him to a movie or coming over with food or a cake or something or other. Just to make sure that he was still sane, that he could still put on that stiff black suit again instead of selling off most of his stuff and buying a bike and going across country somewhere else, anywhere else. Or worse, going a long drop off a short cliff.

Mattie on the slab was cold and pale, his hair lank and somehow very dark (brush on a coloring later, though getting that honey blond was going to be a tricky balance). He looked – odd. He didn’t look like a doll or a corpse or a sleeping person. He looked like a – thing. Vaguely human shaped and flawed and something utterly alien. Alfred knew that it was his brain’s way of protecting itself from the idea of death. Or rather, the idea that it too may die. It let Alfred get one with making sure that he could get a decent expression assembled, though it required some stitching to set Mattie’s lips at something not quite a smile.

Before long, he was starting the messier and arguably more personal business when he inserted the needle-ended tubes to draw out blood and send out the embalming fluid. As the machines whirred, he stared at Mattie’s face again, daring himself to look away from it. Then he started to laugh, having to lean on the slab as he laughed hysterically until he was completely breathless and he could feel tears running down his cheeks. He laughed until the machine had done its work and he had to undo the tubes and then pick up the knife for the next step.

For the first time in over ten years, his hand trembled.

He stared at it. He gripped harder until it was almost painful. Then he set the scalpel down and took a deep breath. Alfred then clapped his hands together, thinking of soft-spoken Kiku who had taught him that trick. The sound echoed in the room as half-hearted applause.

But it jolted him. He opened his hands and they weren’t trembling anymore. He took a breath again and picked up the scalpel with a stinging hand. The cut was fluid and he drew the tool up slowly and then pulled it out. Then there was the trocar sliding into the incision and he pushed, feeling flesh give way to metal. Motors whirred again and he listened for the proper motion of fluid into the chest cavity, bathing the organs with embalming fluid.

Mattie didn’t give him any trouble and Alfred laughed again as he realized it. There was only one spot that needed some extra fluid injections and there was no additional bruising from the process. He felt the tears turn sticky on his cheeks and he had to stop before his vision blurred too much.

Then he had to pause and get tissues and change his gloves before he took care of the skin. All the while, he was already thinking of how he could add color back to those cheeks, to make the eyes no longer so sunken in their sockets, to make Mattie look at peace, not- absent. Absent – as if there had been nothing there at all.

Before he knew it, he had gone through the entire process, the proper tones of brown for the shadows and hollows of a face, the proper pink for lips. He’d brushed color back into Mattie’s hair, had set it with curlers and spray until it had its proper wave. Then he’d dressed Mattie into a dark blue suit, no tie, and hand-knitted socks Katrya had made and Mattie’s favorite soft loafers. Then he’d put Mattie’s spare pair of glasses on and then stood back.

Mattie was incongruous like that, in a suit and with his glasses on. He looked younger; the photograph Alfred had brought in just as a matter of habit looked suddenly very old, perhaps some Dorian Gray echo. But it was Mattie, not the Mattie who had been so small and broken in a hospital bed. It was a Mattie that they could finally say goodbye to properly and Katrya would cry and cry and cry until they had buried him and perhaps one day she would be able to remember without too many tears but with a smile, even if small or shaky or brief.

Alfred put his hand on Mattie’s shoulder. “And this,” he said. “Is the last fucking favor I’m going to do for you, you hear me, you bastard?”

His legs trembled; he tried to rebalance. But then he let himself fall to the floor, bruising his knees against the tile. His head hit the slab and he could almost pretend that the physical pain was the reason why he started to sob.

Tomorrow, they would have the viewing. Tomorrow, he would let Katrya cry against his shoulder and give his part of the eulogy to talk about hot summers together and cold winters spent fighting and lives cut too damned short (he planned on cussing and being utterly unapologetic about it). But for right now, he surveyed his work and felt its intended effects consume him.

**Author's Note:**

> -I based this a little on the manga “The Embalmer” by Mitsukazu Mihara (whose works include Dokuhime/Poison Princess and Dolls). It sometimes plays off a little too much to the macabre but at the same time, it’s a very touching and thought-provoking look at mourning, death, and grief, as well as the social constructs around those concepts in different cultures (specifically America versus Japan). I also used part of my remembrance of the lovely book “Stiff” by Mary Roach, which I highly recommend to anyone who has a macabre sense of humor and a love of popular science as it is a witty, educational look at what human cadavers have been used for and how society looks at death and human remains.  
> -Katrya = Ukraine  
> -Eye caps: little plastic caps with a few barbs that are tucked over a dead person’s eyes and keep the eyelids closed


End file.
